


if it hurts you're all i need

by crookedverite



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 21:49:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13303965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedverite/pseuds/crookedverite
Summary: Lessons learned and unlearned by the most dangerous girl in Ketterdam.





	if it hurts you're all i need

_Breathe in._

Inej takes her first steps in the Slat like a true tightrope walker. Chin high, shoulders back, creeping feet. The wooden floorboards creak underneath Dirtyhands—a tap and a creak and a tap and a creak—but they hardly know she’s there. It doesn’t matter. Every head turns as they climb the staircase. She knows what lingering eyes feel like, but these are just half-hearted glances, there and gone. Like this is normal. Like they don’t need to know who she is to know why she is here, and that is enough for them. There is something else, too, in the way they straighten at the sound of Dirtyhands’ footsteps. 

“Jesper will show you to your room.”

“What?” 

He climbs the next flight of stairs, wordless, while Inej is led away by a pair of Zemeni eyes and a wicked grin. They lean against the doorframe to the little room and watch as she hovers a hand over the rough sheets of the cot, the wooden crates turned on their sides like makeshift furniture. 

Her room. Her cot, her walls, her floor. _Hers._

“You got lucky,” Jesper says, whistling. “The higher you are, the quieter it is. And the less it smells like burnt garbage.” He wrinkles his nose at the stairs in the hall behind him.

Inej stands by the window and breathes in the rot of the city. She remembers hallways doused in sickly sweet perfume, the traces of smoke on blankets she stuffed into her mouth. In those rooms, she held her breath like it was the only thing she owned. But her window in the Slat is open wide just above the Barrel streets, just below the circling crows and gnat-infested sky. Inej fills her lungs with it. It’s as repulsive as ever. _Breathe in breathe out breathe in._ She smiles.

Jesper watches her with careful eyes and says, “Not much, is it?”

“It’s enough.” 

_Breathe out._

Inej takes her next steps in the Slat like she’s walking on air. 

 

-

 

Sankt Petyr is handed to her by Kaz Brekker in a darkened room. It comes without warning and without kindness. She holds the glinted edge between her fingers and wants to weep. 

“Welcome to the Dregs,” he tells her. “Here’s your first lesson.”

Inej’s first lesson clubs her right ear first and then her left, so that every sound becomes a low _thud_. Her chin digs into the alley ground. She’s half-blind without her hearing, but she’s the Wraith and sees the world in vibrations and tremors so she knows his arm is twitching with strain. That’s when she slips out a hand to reach for the knife, lying on the ground just to her left. That’s when she stretches her fingers and closes her eyes and drags the handle and _Saints forgive me Saints forgive me Saints forgive me—_

Her first lesson covers her hands in blood and leaves red footprints on the ground. She trails it into the Slat and up the stairs and across the hall and then she stops.

Kaz does not look pitiful when he looks at her. She hates him for it. She wants to thank him for it. They observe each other like crows; her tunic blackening with blood, his hands perched on his cane.

“Will you pray for all of them?” he asks her, eyebrows furrowed like he really wants to know, even though he doesn’t see the point in her Saints.

“Yes,” she answers anyway. 

It’s a different kind of prayer. Not soft and practiced, like the ones she made for her parents. This one feels wretched. She drops to her knees and presses her forehead against the floorboards. She doesn’t pray for the Black Tip; she prays for herself, and it’s the only prayer she makes without the faith that her Saints are listening. It’s the only time she doesn’t want them to. 

 

-

 

Kaz laughs when Inej leaps into the room and cuts the ropes tying his hands together. The sound is guttered from the blood in his mouth and even she can’t help but smile at how outnumbered they look. Six men positioned around the room, one by the window, but he died the moment Inej slipped open the pane and grazed her knife against his throat. 

Kaz spits out a tooth and grabs his cane, positioning his back to hers. “Ready for your next lesson?”

“You and your untimely lessons,” Inej says. She drops into a crouch as the first man dives toward her. 

Six dead men pile onto the floor in less than ten minutes. They hurry down the stairs of the merchant’s mansion, no longer following the _don’t make a single sound_ orders they originally had. Inej doesn’t look back; she reaches the ground floor first. 

Kaz doesn’t follow. 

The other order was this: _When the job is done, get out as fast as you can._

The choice isn’t hard to make. Inej slips out her knives and scales the stairs again, ears strained for any sign of struggle coming from one of the halls. 

She hears a grunt to her right and turns a corner to find a guard pinning Kaz down with his knees, holding his own cane against his throat, choking him. He cranes his neck and locks his eyes onto hers. He says something, opens his mouth like he’s about to, but Inej moves in a split second. The guard is almost twice as tall as her but she’s ten times as fast. She moves like a ghost, spinning him in circles and kneeing him in all sorts of unforgiving places. Inej hears the guttered noise again, weaker, the sound of a dying wolf. She sends a prayer to the Saints and slashes into flesh, again and again, over and over and over and over until the guard finally drops into a heap on the floor. 

Inej stumbles to Kaz. He’s pushed himself up to lean against the wall with a hand over his throat. If there is such a thing as Kaz being paler than he usually is, Inej hasn’t seen it before today. He’s pressing a hand over a cut—shallow, but losing blood fast. 

“You’re bleeding,” he rasps, moving his hand to her stomach. Inej didn’t notice it before—the guard had gotten her right in her side. One long line from her hipbone to her ribs. It bled through her vest, onto his shirt, the floor. “Inej—”

She tears off a piece of her tunic and wraps her hands in the cloth before pressing down on his cut. “Be quiet. Every time you speak it bleeds faster.”

The thin white line of his mouth twitches when the cloth touches his skin. “You played your cards all wrong. He was twice your size.”

“And now he’s dead.”

“That’s not the point. It could have been you.”

“It could have been _you._ Learn to have some faith, Brekker, or next time I will leave you to bleed out on your own.”

“Next time,” he manages through his teeth. His eyes turn molten. “You get out. You don’t look back.” 

“We don’t leave one of our own behind.”

“We don’t have time for this, Wraith. You’re bleeding all over the _kruge._ ”

“That’s _your_ blood.”

 

-

 

Inej falls.

It’s a foothold in the side of a building she should have known about. It’s the sole of her shoe she should have tightened before climbing. It’s the strand of hair in her eyes she should have braided back. It could be many things, it could be all of them at once, but it doesn’t matter, because she falls all the same and her leg breaks anyway.

She spends weeks in her cot. It drives her up the walls. Jes turns over a wooden crate and uses it to play cards at her side. Nina brings her waffles and coffee and drunken songs. Kaz leans against her doorframe and tells her he can’t afford another accident like this. Inej sleeps and dreams of monsters and carnivals. 

When she was young, she mastered falling before she mastered how not to fall. Nothing was more familiar than the ground rushing towards her, nothing frightened her more than the feeling right before the air was knocked out of her lungs. 

“Your monsters follow you on your rope,” her father used to tell her. “That is life. You mustn’t focus on pushing them off just once, because they will crawl back. They will always crawl back. That is what makes them monsters. You must balance among them, you must keep them at a distance, and you must push them down when they get too close. Do you hear me, Inej?”

“I hear you, Papa.”

“Good. Then push the ground away and climb again.”

Inej did not know what her monsters looked like then. It was a blurry image; the slight rope under her feet, the dirt brown color of the ground far, far below. She only had one fear, if she looked down, if she _fell—_

In the Menagerie, her monsters were covered with heavy jewels where lavish clothing gave way to pale, leathery skin. They were the rooms of a mansion that each housed a different girl’s laughter, guttered noises that turned to sobs when the night was through. They were the words _little lynx_ and the chains around her feet and the kisses she forced herself not to feel. 

One morning, she wakes to find Kaz sitting on the crate by her cot. He has his elbows on his knees, his head in his gloved hands.

“You said my name,” he tells her, voice low and flat. 

She wants to ask him what his monsters look like. Empty coffers with missing _kruge_? Chests full of fake jewels? Touching something without those gloves? Without holding that black line between him and someone else? 

Maybe all his monsters look like him. Maybe everything he touches will turn cruel, too, if he lets it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

She says, “I’m ready to climb again.” 

 

-

 

When she was ten years old, Inej stepped off her caravan’s wagon to follow a deer grazing among the tall grasses on Ryevost’s edge. She went barefoot so as not to disturb the animal, creeping soundlessly through the yellow stalks. When the deer finally raised its antlers from the tall grass, twisting and curling in twin paths, she saw the streaks of blood and bits of flesh clinging to them. The deer turned its head and gory pieces dangled onto fur. It looked at Inej. 

She clapped a hand over her mouth and ran back, but her wagon was gone. Inej did not cry easily, even as a child, but her shuddering breaths turned into wails as she stumbled over the rolling hills of Ravka’s grasslands, calling out for her mother and father. 

She ran barefoot for a mile before her caravan blurred into sight over the next hill. Her father wept, her mother held her daughter’s ruined feet in her hands and rocked her in her arms until she calmed. 

“I thought it would get me, Papa,” Inej whispered to her father. “I thought it would kill me, too.”

“Oh, Inej,” he sighed. 

This is what he didn’t tell her: 

Innocent things did not stay innocent forever. Sometimes they had to bleed to heal. Sometimes they had to hurt to survive. Sometimes they turned rotten just because they could.

 

-

 

“And they call you Dirtyhands,” Inej smiles from his window. 

Kaz wrings his hands in his sink. “They created the mystery. All I’m doing is upholding it.”

“What if I tell Jes what I’ve seen? _Kaz’s hands look as smooth as a woman’s._ ”

He pulls on his gloves with a _snap_. “I’ll tell him your Suli proverbs come from a Ravkan handbook.” 

“I’ll tell him you carry a special balm from a Tailor to keep them soft.”

“I’ll tell him you swipe his cards when he’s not looking.”

“I’ll tell him—” 

 

-

 

It happens undecidedly, but it’s as soft and quiet and determined as her footsteps. It happens when she’s polishing Sankta Alina’s bone handle on his windowsill to prepare for a scouting mission one night. It happens when he turns his head and watches her hands. It happens when she lets him. 

“Scheming?” 

“Something like that.”

“Get some sleep,” she advises. “You look like you’ll pass out before the night is through.”

He throws back his head like he’s about to laugh. “No need to worry on my behalf, Inej. What was it that you said? ‘We don’t leave one of our own behind’?”

Inej sets Sankta Alina down. “If you weren’t a no-good crow, I might believe you truly learned that lesson.” 

“If I weren’t a no-good crow.” Kaz crosses the room to the window and rests a pale hand on the sill by Inej’s feet. He tilts his head, eyes on the birds circling outside. He says nothing more.

It happens like this—Inej watches his hands, Kaz watches the crows. Inej watches moonlight shine on her knife, Kaz watches moonlight shine on her hair. It’s nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. Ketterdam means as much to her as it did yesterday. But today there is a shift. Something skews out of balance. It’s the rope giving away just a little, triggering every muscle in her body to tense at the sudden change, forcing her feet to adjust. But Inej isn't afraid of falling anymore. She likes the thrill. 

 

-

 

Inej learns to climb. She learns to kill. She learns to be a ghost, then to be a child, and then how to steal a woman’s necklace right off her throat. She is not an innocent thing but she does her best to be good. She holds onto the lessons and she gets them right. She pockets them like gold. Someday, she will spend them freely and even ask Kaz to join her. Ketterdam is a tiny corner of the world and Inej Ghafa conquered it with her own hands. She could conquer so much more.

One day, Kaz asks her, “What would you say to four million _kruge?_ ”

In the end, the Wraith is just an invisible girl with praying hands and glinting knives and a tiny wooden room and years of girlhood to make up for. So when he asks, she does not say no.


End file.
